German Party Poopers Do Their Best to Ruin a Celebration

By ROGER COHEN

Published: August 17, 2000

DRESDEN, Germany, Aug. 16—
Plans for a celebration of the 10th anniversary of German unity on Oct. 3 have turned into a fiasco revealing the enduring divisions of the country and the wretched state of the Christian Democratic Party.

Helmut Kohl, who as chancellor seized the opportunity to unify the country after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, announced this week that he would not attend an official celebration in Dresden, the city that was a center of the dissent that led to the crumbling of East Germany.

The reason he gave was that the occasion should be a ''day of the people, many of whom courageously took to the street under the banner 'We are one people' and so laid the groundwork for this miracle.'' At such a moment, he added, ''Personalities should not take center stage.''

Magnanimous words. But the fact is many ''personalities'' will be in Dresden, including the French president, Jacques Chirac, and Mr. Kohl's absence will leave a hole as large as the man himself. Behind his decision lies a festering rancor at his treatment by the party he dominated for many years.

Since the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall last year, when Mr. Kohl took center-stage along with with George Bush and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the former chancellor has suffered an astonishing fall from grace. Precipitated by a party financing scandal, his eclipse seems to have left the Christian Democrats rudderless.

Commenting on the looming debacle in Dresden, the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine said, ''Mr. Kohl cannot be filtered out of the recent history of the 'Party of German Unification' if anything tangible is to be left at all.''

What has been very tangible this summer is the personal bitterness within the party. Kurt Biedenkopf, a veteran Christian Democrat and, as state premier of Saxony, the organizer of the Dresden event, was instrumental in engineering the replacement of Mr. Kohl as party leader by Angela Merkel this year.

This has not been forgotten by Mr. Kohl, who has refused to comply with the law by naming donors who provided the Christian Democrats with more than $1 million.

In effect, by turning down Mr. Biedenkopf's invitation, the former chancellor has taken revenge. He has shown how large his shadow still looms over a party that trails the governing Social Democrats by close to 10 percentage points in most opinion polls and shows little sign of revival under Ms. Merkel.

For weeks now, senior party figures have been bickering over whether Mr. Biedenkopf insulted Mr. Kohl by inviting him to Dresden but not inviting him to speak.

Friedhelm Ost, a senior party member, said this sort of invitation amounted to an ''affront.'' Wolfgang Bosbach, another leading Christian Democrat, suggested the squabbling was such that Germans might begin to think that Gerhard Schroder, the current chancellor, was ''the father of reunification.''

The arguments have been sharpened by the fact that Lothar de Maiziere, the last leader of East Germany as it struggled to sustain itself while abandoning Communist Party rule, has been invited to speak in Dresden.

In part, this decision reflects the widespread bitterness that was evident in the east of the country last year when initial planning for the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall excluded any figures from the former Communist state. As in many things, East Germans felt excluded.

In the end, Joachim Gauck, a former leader of the protests in the east, was invited to speak and famously remarked of Germany's difficult unification, ''We dreamed of paradise and woke up in North-Rhine Westphalia.''

This time, Mr. de Maiziere has been high on the guest list from the outset. But conservative members of the Christian Democratic Party have been making much of unproven suggestions that he was long in the pay of the East German state security service, the Stasi.

Edmond Stoiber, the state premier of Bavaria, said this week that it was ''incomprehensible'' that Mr. de Maiziere be invited to speak when Mr. Kohl had not been.

The arguments over Mr. de Maiziere have illustrated once again the difficulties of the eastern and western parts of the country in understanding each other. Unemployment in the east, about 17 percent, is still twice that in the west, and a bitter sentiment persists in many depressed eastern areas that unification amounted to a western takeover in which 17 million East Germans became second-class citizens.

In a letter to Mr. Biedenkopf, the former chancellor, who will attend a low-profile celebration organized by a foundation close to his party in Berlin on Sept. 27, alluded to these problems but insisted that the hopes of 1990 had been fulfilled.

''Even with all the political difficulties and economic burdens of the first decade of reunification, I still feel great joy at this event,'' Mr. Kohl wrote. ''Today the hopes of a decade ago have become a reality, and 'we are one people.' ''

One people, but with at least two celebrations. In recent weeks, the governing Social Democrats have made it clear they will hold their own commemoration of unification at the World's Fair in Hanover on Oct. 3, to be attended by Chancellor Schroder after he leaves Dresden.